Multi-Round Human-AI Collaboration with User-Specified Requirements
This work addresses the need for principled frameworks in multiround conversational AI interactions to improve decision quality, though it is incremental as it builds on existing human-AI collaboration concepts with user-defined constraints.
The paper tackled the problem of ensuring reliable human-AI collaboration in high-stakes decisions by introducing a framework based on user-specified rules for counterfactual harm and complementarity, with results showing that an online algorithm maintained prescribed violation rates and allowed predictable shifts in human accuracy across simulated and crowdsourced tasks.
As humans increasingly rely on multiround conversational AI for high stakes decisions, principled frameworks are needed to ensure such interactions reliably improve decision quality. We adopt a human centric view governed by two principles: counterfactual harm, ensuring the AI does not undermine human strengths, and complementarity, ensuring it adds value where the human is prone to err. We formalize these concepts via user defined rules, allowing users to specify exactly what harm and complementarity mean for their specific task. We then introduce an online, distribution free algorithm with finite sample guarantees that enforces the user-specified constraints over the collaboration dynamics. We evaluate our framework across two interactive settings: LLM simulated collaboration on a medical diagnostic task and a human crowdsourcing study on a pictorial reasoning task. We show that our online procedure maintains prescribed counterfactual harm and complementarity violation rates even under nonstationary interaction dynamics. Moreover, tightening or loosening these constraints produces predictable shifts in downstream human accuracy, confirming that the two principles serve as practical levers for steering multi-round collaboration toward better decision quality without the need to model or constrain human behavior.